Emily Mortimer Quotations

My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

I'm always sort of anticipating life being difficult, but on a basic level, that's sort of on the surface, on a basic level, I'm optimistic in the sense that I think it's all going to be alright in the end.

Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die.

I went to dinner with my mother-in-law and I just realized I was talking in sound bites to her and expecting her to laugh every time I said anything or be jotting something down in a notebook. So you have to kind of really have a talk with yourself after you've done a press tour and say, 'Chill out!'

I borrowed my friend's car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true, in the first day of borrowing the car, I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.

Breakfast is my favorite meal. I cook a big one for everyone - bacon and eggs. I own a lot of eggcups.

Doing press is like eating at McDonald's: while it's going on it's vaguely enjoyable - you're seduced by your own vanity and taking yourself rather seriously - but immediately afterwards you feel sick.

I must have been a really pretentious little girl.

I had friends at school, but I was never part of a gang and I dreamed of that sense of belonging to a group. You know, where people would call me 'Em' and shout across the bar, 'Em, what are you drinking?' after the show.

I did my homework and didn't go out much, and had a very highly developed kitsch fantasy life where I dreamed of being a dancing girl.

I guess secrets are part of the fabric of everybody's lives. I mean everybody's lives, and guilt is part of the fabric of everybody's lives.

It's dangerous talking about yourself too much because you find yourself talking in sound bites.

You are exposing yourself all the time as an actor. There's the risk of being thought of as bad or boring or unattractive.

I'm physically completely mal-coordinated. My best friend used to make me run for the bus just to give herself a quick, cheap laugh because I definitely don't have that sophisticated cool thing down.

I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

I think we probably will end up in America because he would be giving up much more to come and live here. If you want to work in film, that's really where you have to be. But I'm not sure that being an ex-pat is very good for one's sense of self.

I'd been shy since childhood, constantly full of self-doubt. And as an actor, I'd been so scared of failing that I made my career - and myself - a big joke.

In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.

I decided to give acting a serious, committed try, and soon after, I read the script for 'Lovely and Amazing.' The story was beautiful and honest, and the characters struggled with the same insecurities many women - including me - face. I didn't think I had a chance in hell of being in the film, but I knew I had to go for it.

Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.

I am a good mother and I feel proud about it.

I'm a dual citizen, as are my husband and children. We have got eight passports between us; we're weighed down by them whenever we go anywhere.

I want any excuse to come home. My dad is not a spring chicken any more. If anyone says, 'Go buy a postage stamp in London,' I'll go and do it.

I've only half-admitted I'm a professional. I know I am, I've paid my dues, but one of the things I could do better when I'm acting is to really be rigorous and to think I know how to do it. To use my brain.

I want to discover more things about acting.

I'm always drawn to the thing I think I can't possibly do, because I tend to be better when I think I can't possibly do something than I am when I'm pretty sure I can do something.

To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.

I think that you can get more passionate about somebody the longer you're with them and the more you know them and the more you go through together. Being married is definitely better than it's cracked up to be I think.

I think half the time I just assume I don't really know what I'm doing - you have to do that to a certain extent, but you don't have to think you're an idiot savant.

I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences, and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.

The thing I miss about L.A. is time. I feel like I had much more time there, partly because no one is ever really doing anything.

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

Some people come alive at night. I'm hopeless by 9 p.m. Coffee and Cadbury buy me an extra half hour. Often I can't get my clothes off I'm so far gone.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue, and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it.

The odd thing is if you asked me to do the accent now I would find it very difficult unless I was also playing that part, because I associate it so much with entering into the role and stepping into someone else's shoes.

I wake up early. At 6:30 A.M., I'm at my most optimistic.

New York is great, but I miss L.A. - I feel like there was something exotic about L.A. that I kind of underestimated at the time. It was very unfamiliar to me.

I'm trying to avoid, you know, guilt, even though before the child is born, you're already thinking you're doing things wrong... Why do I think that will probably carry over until the day you die?

I like to mix it up, yeah. I don't sort of think, 'Oh, I need to do a comedy, I've done three dramas this year.' I don't think of it like that, but I definitely from project to project I feel like I want to just do something different all of the time and stop, I don't want to bore myself or anyone else.

But I have to grow out of it, because it's very boring, really. Even when you're telling people how crap you are, you're still banging on about yourself.

So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.

I was terribly shy when I was growing up, I really wasn't confident with other people and I think I was always afraid of up or not being this very cool, amazing person that I wanted to be.

You don't have to be brilliant at everything. You just have to have the courage to put yourself in the line of fire.

I was determined not to become an American citizen but I did it for completely cynical reasons: to avoid paying inheritance tax in the U.S.

I wake up early. At 6:30 A.M., I'm at my most optimistic.

Every time you start a new job, you're starting from the beginning again and it's terrifying. And you feel like you're going to be fired and told to go home and never to darken the doors of these people ever again.

'Leonie' did get made and it was an extremely wonderful experience. I got to travel the world. I filmed for 6 months - 3 months in New Orleans and 3 months in Japan.

I borrowed my friends car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true, in the first day of borrowing the car, I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.

I'm an optimist by nature, myself, I think.

There were moments where I was being kicked in the stomach, and even though I had this brace on to protect me, I still had to prepare myself for it . You can't be relaxed when that's happening. You have to brace your muscles. I can remember thinking as it was about to happen "Wasn't that how Houdini died?" I think it was.

I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part.

I'm just happy to be a film where for once I don't have to worry about my hair, because my managers are always complaining about my hair looking depressing in my movies. Which is true. I mean, it's true.

I never felt I was quite the ticket academically. I always felt I had to put in an enormous amount of effort not to be disappointing. So I worked really hard, but at the time it suited me, because I didn't do very much else.

I spent a lot of time with a real detective, a lady detective inspector who was the only female detective inspector in the whole of East London. She and I hung out a lot. She showed me what she did and I spent time with her. So, [she was] a lot of the inspiration for the way I dressed and sometimes the dialogue in those interview scenes where we're cross examining and questioning the youths and trying to get a confession out of them.

It's very difficult to find the time or the money for people to organize rehearsals for some movies. It staggers me how little preparation often goes into these scenes which are difficult and complicated. You think, "God, it's crazy. I've never met this person before and here I am having to work at how to do a whole performance on the set." It was great to have a few days of just talking to Michael [Caine]and Daniel [Barber] and thinking about the characters and the relationship between them before we started shooting.

Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!

51st State was one that I loved doing because the character was so out there, and in a way I was sad to leave the character behind. I'm afraid I could never be that cool in real life!

Despite being extremely professional, Michael Caine has a giggle which was lethal for me because once you catch his eyes, once you realize the other person is a giggler too, it's curtains.

When I'm panicked about my love handles, I go to the YMCA and get obsessed with Kid Rock videos as I'm on the running machine.

The thing I miss about L.A. is time. I feel like I had much more time there, partly because no one is ever really doing anything.

I had watched Alfie, but I didn't consider it a prerequisite. Michael Caine was just extremely fabulous. He's one of the most professional actors I've ever worked with. I guess after a lifetime of doing it, you know what you're doing. He's incredibly uncomplaining, undemanding.

It is brilliant going to the theatre and being forced to sit and listen and think about life. It can be almost a near-religious experience.